Mind Circus

To boot the recovery partition on a Vista Dell XPS laptop, you need to press F8 as the laptop boots.

This will bring up the Vista boot menu, from which you can choose Recovery Console (usually the top option). Vista will then boot into a special mode, not unlike Safe Mode, and after logging in, will give you the option to run the Dell Recovery Tool. The recovery process is actually very fast - about 10 minutes in my case.

Unfortunately, this took me ages to find. Usually, laptops tell you how you can run a System Recovery when they boot, e.g. “Press F10 to run Recovery”, but the Dell XPS Vista laptops don’t do this at all. It certainly left me bewildered, until I stumbled upon the solution, via a Google search.

On the 25th June 2003, DisplayLink* was officially incorporated in the UK; making us 5 years old.

Happy Birthday DisplayLink!

*OK so, technically, DisplayLink was known as Newnham Research back in 2003, before we changed our name to DisplayLink in November 2006

The more I see and hear about the various projects that are going on inside DisplayLink, the more exicted I get about what we’re doing, and where we’re going to go.

The vision of some of the people in this company is phenomenal, and I’m proud to be along for the ride.

The more I play video content from a USB stick on the Xbox 360, the more I want a TV that can play content directly from a USB Mass Storage Device.

Surely it can’t be that hard? I’m thinking possibly something like a tiny Linux distribution embedded into the TV, something akin to the “Instant Play” feature on many laptops.

It’s been a long time coming, but I’ve finally got the Twitter bug. It’s nice not having to worry about typing something of “value”, like I feel I need to in a blog post.

Feel free to follow my inane updates if you like